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A prospective client asked me last month if I handled estate planning. I told him no, not for complex cases, and gave him the name of an attorney I trust in town. He seemed a little surprised, like he expected me to hedge, maybe claim I'd picked up enough along the way to wing it. I don't wing it. I'm not specifically trained in estate law, and pretending otherwise would cost him a lot more than it would cost me. What Specialization Actually Looks Like Financial advisors are

Behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky spent decades studying how people actually make decisions under uncertainty, rather than how a textbook says they should, and a well documented finding from that work is called loss aversion. Losing a hundred dollars feels roughly twice as painful as gaining a hundred dollars feels good, and that imbalance shapes financial decisions far more than most people realize. It isn't a character flaw or a sign of poor discipline,

Financial struggle doesn't always show up on a balance sheet, even when the numbers have improved, the income is higher, the debt lower, and the period of genuine scarcity that once defined daily decisions has passed. By any external measure the financial situation has changed, sometimes dramatically, and for the better, yet the person living inside that situation still feels like the person they were before it changed, still making decisions from that older place, still carr

There is a financial pattern that appears across income levels, age groups, and household types with enough consistency that it deserves its own name. It is the pattern of people who have clear, specific, genuinely held aspirations for their financial lives and who are, simultaneously, spending small amounts of money so regularly and so automatically that those aspirations never get the resources they require to become real. It's not a crisis pattern. Nobody in this situation

There's a particular kind of tension that exists when a couple sits down together for a financial conversation, and it has very little to do with the numbers on the page. It's the tension of two people who care about each other, who want the same things in most areas of their lives, but who cannot seem to agree on anything the moment money enters the conversation. That tension is one of the most common and least discussed dimensions of personal financial planning, and underst

There is a reason rewards credit cards are one of the most marketed financial products in existence. They work, just not primarily for you. The premise is straightforward and genuinely appealing. Use your card for everyday purchases and earn points, miles, or cash back in return. Over time, those rewards accumulate into something tangible, a flight, a hotel stay, a statement credit, and the whole arrangement feels like the card is paying you to spend money you were going to s

Most of us learned about the Declaration of Independence in a classroom, which means most of us learned the outline of it without fully absorbing the weight of it. A group of colonists were unhappy with British rule. They wrote a document. They declared independence. America was born. The story gets compressed into something that feels inevitable in hindsight, and inevitability has a way of draining courage of its meaning. It was not inevitable. Not even close. What Was Actua

Keeping up with the Joneses is not a new problem. The impulse to measure our own financial lives against the people around us is deeply human, and it has driven spending decisions that outpaced income for as long as there have been neighbors to compare ourselves to. What changed is the scale, the speed, and the design of the comparison itself. What Social Media Did to Financial Comparison A generation ago, your reference group was small and visible. The people you compared yo

There's a cost that shows up nowhere on a tax return, a budget, or a balance sheet, and it follows a lot of people who are the first in their family to achieve something significant. The first to finish college. The first to start a business. The first to build any real financial stability. If that describes you, you may already know this feeling even if you've never had a name for it. What the Loyalty Tax Looks Like The first generation loyalty tax is the quiet emotional cos

There is a particular kind of financial trap that is almost impossible to see from the outside, because it is designed to look like its opposite. It presents as success. It signals prosperity. It occupies the right neighborhoods, drives the right vehicles, and wears the right brands. And underneath all of it, the balance sheet tells a completely different story. This is the pattern Thomas Stanley spent decades documenting, first in The Millionaire Next Door and across subsequ

The Date and What It Marks June 19, 1865 is the date Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that all enslaved people were free. It was not the date the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. President Lincoln had issued that proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring freedom for enslaved people in Confederate states. But a proclamation requires enforcement, and in the absence of Union presence across much of the South, that enforc

The Basic Distinction Every traditional IRA and 401(k) operates on the same premise. You contribute money before it's taxed, reduce your taxable income today, and defer the tax bill until retirement, at which point every dollar you withdraw, principal and growth alike, is taxed as ordinary income. The appeal is immediate. A smaller tax bill this year feels like a win, and for many people it is, at least in the short term. Roth accounts reverse that sequence. Contributions com

The Cycle Nobody Sees Coming Lifestyle creep operates beneath the level of conscious financial decision-making, and that's precisely what makes it so persistent. It doesn't appear as one reckless choice. It shows up as a series of reasonable ones, each justified by rising income, a deserved reward, or the simple logic that you can afford it now and couldn't before. The car upgrade made sense. The move to a nicer neighborhood made sense. The restaurants, the wardrobe, the vaca

Most people picture a financial advisor sitting across a desk talking about mutual funds and retirement projections. That image isn't wrong exactly, but it's incomplete, and the difference between what people think advising is and what it actually covers keeps a lot of people from getting help they could genuinely use. The core technical competencies in financial planning are well established. Retirement planning, tax strategy, investment management, insurance analysis, and e

Building better financial habits isn't a knowledge problem. Most people who carry too much credit card debt know it's a problem. Most people who don't save enough know they should be saving more. The information isn't missing. Something else is. What's actually in the way is the pull of existing behavior, and existing behavior is stubborn not because people are weak, but because the brain is efficient. It automates what it repeats, and automation runs quietly in the backgroun

A common reason people give for not working with a financial advisor is that they don't think they need one yet. Things are stable. The bills are getting paid. There's some money going into a retirement account. Nothing is on fire. The advisor can wait. What tends to follow is one of two things. Either things stay stable and the wait continues indefinitely, or something disrupts the stability and now there's a problem to solve under pressure. Neither outcome is a good argumen

June is Pride Month, and Sexton Finance is proud to stand with and serve the LGBTQ+ community. That statement isn't a formality. Financial planning is personal work. It touches identity, family structure, legal standing, and long-term security in ways that look different for different people, and the LGBTQ+ community has historically navigated financial planning in a landscape that wasn't always designed with them in mind. Estate planning, beneficiary designations, insurance

Most people have heard of the sunk cost fallacy, at least in passing. The basic idea isn't complicated, money already spent is gone, and the fact that you spent it shouldn't influence what you decide next. Past costs are irrelevant to future decisions. Knowing that and acting on it are two different things. What the Sunk Cost Fallacy Actually Looks Like In a classroom, it's clean and easy to illustrate. You bought a concert ticket for $80. The night of the show, you feel terr

Earlier this year I published my first memoir, Bleeding for Ghosts, which tells the story of my journey through financial crisis, the identity that formed in survival mode, and the moment I finally had the words to describe what had happened to me. Today I'm excited to announce the follow-up. Ever since the launch of Bleeding for Ghosts, I've been working on something, and now it's finally here! When the Ghosts Still Whisper is officially live on Amazon and I could not be mor

Financial comparison is nearly universal. Almost everyone, at some point, has looked at someone else's income, lifestyle, home, car, or apparent financial ease and felt something uncomfortable stir. That feeling tends to produce one of two responses, a motivating pressure to do more, or a quiet erosion of satisfaction with what already exists. More often than people realize, it produces both at once. The research on social comparison and financial behavior is consistent on on